A Lucky Child: A Memoir Of Surviving Auschwitz As A Young Boy '

When asking anyone what the Holocaust is, there is a very standard answer as to what it was. It is infamously known as the mass killings and imprisonment of Jewish people throughout most of Western Europe. What people fail to acknowledge is that there is more to the Holocaust than this “standard answer.” There have been multiple accounts of what it was like to be in the Holocaust such as the famous books The Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank and Night by Elie Wiesel. The memoir A Lucky Child: A Memoir of Surviving Auschwitz as a Young Boy by Thomas Buergenthal serves the same purpose as any text about this atrocity has served: to inform the public about what truly went on in the concentration camps and beyond. However, A Lucky Child provides a different perspective on the Holocaust. As the title indicates, it is a book about how Buergenthal was able to outlast the most infamous concentration camp: Auschwitz. It is an inspiring story and puts the reader into perspective about all the children who had been killed during the Holocaust, yet he had survived. If it wasn’t for the day that Thomas stood in a brave manner and stated to a commandant that he could work, Thomas would have suffered the same fate that a majority of children during the Holocaust by dying. There was no purpose for

Buergenthal tells a story that is not similar to Elie Wiesel, although they tell of the same event. This book is not intended to expose the horrors of the camps, but to rather show how a child was able to conquer all those horrors and come out on the other side, willing to stand up for anything that seems unjust. It is because of people like Thomas Buergenthal that violations of human rights are taken more seriously than ever, which is expected. From beginning to end, it is inspiring and allows the true resiliency of all children to shine